|  Making waves: In the hunt for invisibility, other benefits seen  | By Jeremy Wagstaff SINGAPORE (Reuters) - A new way of assembling things, called metamaterials, may in the not too distant future help to protect a building from earthquakes by bending seismic waves around it. While the holy grail of metamaterials is still to make objects and people invisible to the eye, they are set to have a more tangible commercial impact playing more mundane roles - from satellite antennas to wirelessly charging cellphones. Metamaterials are simply materials that exhibit properties not found in nature, such as the way they absorb or reflect light. This makes metamaterials the tool of choice for scientists racing to build all sorts of wave-cloaking devices, including the so-called invisibility cloak - a cover to render whatever's inside effectively invisible by bending light waves around it.
| Read More » Russia bets on sweeping reform to revive ailing space industry  | By Alissa de Carbonnel BAIKONUR, Kazakhstan (Reuters) - From rocket-shaped playground equipment to faded murals of cosmonauts, mementos of the heyday of Soviet space exploration are scattered around this sandswept town that launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit in 1961. When President Vladimir Putin described the space port on the remote Kazakh steppe as "physically aged" in April, he could have been speaking about Russia's space industry itself. In Baikonur as elsewhere, the once-pioneering sector is struggling to live up to its legacy, end an embarrassing series of botched launches, modernize decaying infrastructure and bring in new blood and new ideas. Putin hopes a sweeping reform he signed off on this month will not come too late to turn the industry around - part of a push to make Russia a high-technology superpower by salvaging leading Cold War-era industries and research centers.
| Read More » All About You: Top 10 Human Nature Stories of 2013 From political beliefs to social deviation to sexual attraction, here are the highlights of what science found out about you this year: Read More » Wow! Space Station Crosses Crescent Moon in Amazing Photo  | The International Space Station can be seen cruising in front of a crescent moon in this stunning night sky photo recently sent to SPACE.com.
| Read More » Whoops! Earth's Oldest 'Diamonds' Actually Polishing Grit  | Evidence of Earth's first continents — 4.3-billion-year-old "diamonds" — are actually just fragments of polishing grit, a new study finds. But it turns out that the gems weren't actually diamonds, but polishing paste, smushed into hairs'-width cracks when the zircons were prepared for laboratory tests, according to a study published online in the Feb. 1, 2014, edition of the journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. Scientists at the University of California, Riverside (UCR) found the mistake by snapping pictures of the disputed diamonds with a powerful transmission electron microscope, along with other techniques. The original authors, who provided their samples for analysis by Green and lead study author Larissa Dobrzhinetskaya, also agree with the conclusions.
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